Top 3 Characteristics of a Collaborative Metal Stamping Partner

Your parts are the sum of your whole—literally. They are what makes your business, well, a business. You’ve worked hard to design parts that help your company grow and thrive. When you hand off your product designs to a metal stamping company, you have strict expectations that you need met.The bottom line here: communicating expectations and intentions are at the core of ensuring a smooth transition and shared values and results. Trusting your metal stamping partner—whether with metal forming, progressive die stamping, deep drawing, assembly, brazing, painting, or coining—you need to be on the same page and have clear, consistent standards of practice by which your collaboration operates.

Communication Is the Heart of Successful Collaboration

Without open, transparent communication, the integrity of any relationship can be easily compromised. And not necessarily because of bad intent, but from a negligence, of sorts: anemic emails that don’t give you all the info you need to make an informed decision or poorly timed ones that catch you as you are heading out the door for the day. Perhaps your supplier is a moving target that doesn’t seem to ever have an opening for a follow-up call or isn’t available with any regularity. We’ve all worked with companies that score better than others on this. We can’t always pinpoint what comprises good communication, but we certainly feel it in its absence.

Here is a short list of what you should demand expect from a tool and stamping partner.

Dependable, consistent communication

This means you are kept in the loop on everything: quotes, revisions,quality requirements, engineering recommendations, any hold-ups or backlogs in tool construction—everything. You depend on timely delivery dates for your deep draw parts because you have customers waiting on you to deliver. You need to be up to speed—even, and especially if, production isn’t. Anticipating and responding with agility to customers’ needs must be at the forefront of your tool and stamping company’s culture.

Speed of response

Effective communication is timely. Hitting you over the head with answers—or problems—on your way out the door at the end of a long day is not an optimal practice. Yes, sometimes that is the only time we get to sit for a minute and respond to emails, but customers need to be able to plan for any contingencies that come their way. You might have a fantastic engineering recommendation that will save time, money, and resources, but there is always a chain of personnel on the other end that needs to be informed. When vital information is not communicated in a timely manner, it can push forward progress back. Good communicators are focused on getting the job done for the customer—from the customer’s perspective—and are accountable for their responsibilities and expectations, while not getting caught up in who has the ownership (a.k.a. credit or blame).

Clarity

Your metal stamping manufacturer should be very clear on who it is and what its capabilities are. Clarity begets reliability. When your partner representatives are clear, so are expectations of standards of operation, all quality issues, production, and delivery. They know exactly what they can offer you for tooling, metal stamping, deep draw stamping, and engineering expertise. All expectations should be communicated clearly, up front. The bottom line on this is: a quality, dependable metal stamping supplier will not tell you what you want to hear—it will tell you what you need to know.

Up Next ...

In our next installment in this three-part series, we’ll share with you some eye-opening (and sometimes surprising) stats about customer service. What customers expect, and how they react when it’s good … and when it’s not.

In the meantime, we’d love to talk with you about your next metal stamping project. Larson Tool & Stamping Company will let you know, with integrity and clarity, everything you can expect for each project you partner on. Contact us now to discuss your next metal stamping job.